When guided to feel more stuck, the coached woman discovered something crucial: her body wanted to spend energy getting out of the feeling. The wanting to escape IS the stuckness. You have to want to get out for stuckness to exist. Being “stuck in heaven” isn’t stuckness — the struggle to escape is required.
“The avoidance of the hole is the stuckness.”
This is why going right into the middle of an emotional pattern is more effective than trying to get out of it. When the woman allowed herself to go into the “black hole” she’d been avoiding, she passed right through it and came out the other side, smiling. The abyss she feared was actually the exit.
A feeling that is resisted shows up as a different feeling entirely — resisted anger feels nothing like embraced anger. What she experienced as “stuckness” was the sensation of resisting helplessness, which was itself the sensation of resisting something deeper. Each layer of resistance added another layer of suffering.
Related Concepts
- Stuck is a feeling, not reality
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- Resistance changes the emotion
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you
- Stuckness is resistance to the abyss, not the abyss itself
- Craving is the pushing away
- Trying to feel your feelings is as much resistance as trying not to feel them